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AEGEE-Valletta, MEP Dalli team up for youth entrepreneurship initiative

AEGEE-Valletta and MEP Miriam Dalli are proud to collaborate with a number of organisations, to embark on an ambitious project to promote Youth Entrepreneurship in Malta.

Graduating from university is probably one of the best feelings in the world. After years of lectures, sleepless nights and coffee-fuelled breakdowns, very little feels quite rewarding as receiving your degree. But nothing can put a damper on this joy like leaving the student life behind and finding that there is no job waiting for you on the other side of it all.

In some countries youth unemployment has reached over 50%, meaning that more than half the young people in certain countries cannot even find a work (whether they be freshly out of university or otherwise). With this in mind the idea of Entrepreneurship is one that has flourished as a solution to an ever-growing problem.

Officially the word entrepreneurship means: “the process of starting a business of another organization;” over time however it has developed to be a more colloquial term for an innovator who creates something with a fresh new take, perhaps even employing ideas previously unthought-of before. It is because of this growing concern over youth unemployment that AEGEE (European Students’ Forum) has made it one of its main thematic focuses for the year 2014-2017.

It is widely accepted that one of the main combatants of youth unemployment is in fact entrepreneurship, which is why AEGEE-Valletta has decided to work on this project.

This project will be led in tandem with the office of Dr Miriam Dalli MEP, who personally endorsed the initial concept put forward by AEGEE-Valletta and with whom we are closely collaborating to spread this idea and create dialogue on such an important concept. Miriam Dalli has always advocated about the need to instill and promote entrepreneurial spirit even before being elected as an MEP.

Together with Miriam Dalli, AEGEE-Valletta is looking forward to a conference spread out on three different events which will finally result in suggestions and recommendations that we would want to put forward.

The first event will take place on the University of Malta campus and will set the ball rolling. This event will be a public dialogue, with speakers from various walks of entrepreneurship (social, political or knowledge) coming to explain their work, what they do and how they achieved what they worked for. The aim is to engage participants to talk to the speakers, and to start discussions about any questions they may have.

The second event will take place in the city of Brussels, Belgium. Here there will be an intensive seminar where the plan is to have 100 participants attending. Various representatives from student organisations, as well as other young people interested in entrepreneurship will travel to Brussels for a 3 day seminar with talks from foreign entrepreneurs and young politicians, as well as workshops and more discussion panels.

Finally there will be a third event, which will act as a follow-up, as well as a concluding meeting to the previous two sessions. Here, together with the help of student organisations and other groups which focus on helping young entrepreneurs, a final youth meeting will be hosted in Malta with the participation of over 300 hundred youths from across Europe, who will be invited to collaborate and contribute to the compiling and finalisation of a document; the document is to affect legislation with regards to helping the start-up of entrepreneurial adventures on a local level.

The third stage of this project (conference) is part-funded by the Ministry for Finance.

The combination of the three events is a large scale project which, in itself is a very daring one, but no conference on entrepreneurship would be complete if the organisers didn’t learn a thing or two about working “outside the box” and learning to think big.

Throughout all three events, the number of students attending is estimated to reach 500 but should the final document be accepted, the number of future entrepreneurs who will benefit from this project cannot be counted.

Should you wish to participate and help out in these events, do not hesitate to contact us on the AEGEE-Vallettapage or via email on info@aegee-valletta.org.